(Forbes) One of the more remarkable, if little known, facts about Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s soon-to-be ex-wife, is her given name: Wen-ge. In the original Chinese characters, this means Cultural Revolution. Quite a cross to bear, particularly as she was born in 1968 at the height of Mao’s murderous mayhem. Evidently the embarrassment as she reached her teens was only slightly less than if, say, a German male born in the early 1940s had to go through life with a moniker like “Blitzkrieg.”

None of us can be blamed for our given names, of course, and she understandably tried out a couple of name changes before she reached Yale. (The full story was unearthed in 2007 by the Australian journalist Eric Ellis.) Given her background as the daughter of a mid-level Chinese Communist Party official, however, her presence in Rupert Murdoch’s life raises interesting questions about the effect she may have had in tempering his media empire’s editorial stance.